Sex and the old maestro
Fiona Maddocks
THE LETTERS OF ARTURO TOSCANINI compiled, edited and translated by Harvey Sachs
Faber, £30, pp. 468, ISBN 0571196292
Whatever is meant by 'middle age' (around 60 these days, as far as I can judge) you have to fall safely into that category to have any real memory of Toscanini 'live'. The Italian conductor, famed for his hot-tempered intensity and musical objectivity, as well as his bold stand against Fascism and Nazism, gave his last concert in 1954 when he was 87. He died three years later. His career spanned an impressive 70 years, from the final flowering of Verdi and Puccini (as a young man he conducted the premieres of La Boheme and Turandot, and had an affair with the first Madame Butterfly) to the revolutions of Stravinsky and beyond.
Not that Toscanini had much truck with modernism, which he largely ignored. He is said to have detested Schoenberg and admitted to having no desire to conduct radical new works 'which I gladly leave to other conductors'. His detachment from the development of the art form itself leaves Toscanini in a curious historical position: charismatic giant or influential footnote depending on your point of view. In the conducting world he had no official pupils or protégés, although Claudio Abbado. Riccardo Muti and others name him as their greatest influence. Not everyone holds conductors in such high esteem (including many orchestral musicians whose views on the subject tend either to be dismissive or unprintable). The scurrilous American composer and critic, Virgil Thomson, predicted Toscanini's reputation would quickly fade because 'he has mostly remained on the sidelines of the creative struggle'.
Thomson was wrong. History in the interim has favoured performer over creator. While most Spectator readers know who Toscanini is, few would have a clue about Virgil Thomson, who died as recently as 1989. But then Thomson hadn't bargained for the power of the record business. Launching new artists is expensive (EMI took 15 years to break even with their biggest star, Simon Rattle). Far easier and cheaper to resuscitate, remaster and breathe new life into conductors of the past and sell them in so-called core repertoire — Beethoven, Brahms — at budget price. (Fortunately the theatre has as yet no equivalent. Imagine having to choose between cut-price Granville-Barker and full-priced Richard Eyre for your first taste of Shakespeare.) Toscanini's great gift was his unswerving fidelity to the composer's intention. In this he was revolutionary. Whereas his predecessors, Wagner and Mahler among them, had regarded conducting as a form of selfexpression, Toscanini tried to keep his own personality out of his performances. Needless to say, his fiery, autocratic temperament was all too present in every flick of his baton or twitch of an eyebrow, but in comparison with the generation before he was considered literal, objective, dispassionate. He was also, as this new edition of letters demonstrates, scrupulous in preparation, anxious when rehearsal time was short, nervous of meeting an unfamiliar orchestra and in most other respects neurotic and publicity-shy. He dragged orchestral standards up by sheer force of will (and famous roaring rages), and as an interpreter of Beethoven, Strauss and Wagner, as well as the great Italian opera composers, he had few rivals.
Harvey Sachs wrote his biography of Toscanini in 1978. At the time he believed little of Toscanini's correspondence had survived. In the 1990s his view changed and he eventually tracked down more than 1,500 letters from the maestro (who had wisely destroyed most of those he received and would doubtless be appalled to find his recipients had not done likewise). Whether they add much to our understanding is debatable. While they provide interesting commentary on half a century of performance, especially in La Scala, Milan and New York, there is relatively little on music itself beyond expressions of preference. He is colourful in his variously low opinions of Beecham, Strauss (he thought Arabella wretched, though later seems to have had an affair with Lotte Lehman, who created the role), FurtwEingler, Henry Wood. Political life, in which he so wholeheartedly engaged himself, remained surprisingly marginal, rude remarks about Mussolini and Hitler and a powerful exposition of his reasons for refusing to conduct again at Bayreuth notwithstanding.
Sex is the chief player. Toscanini had a reputation as a serial womaniser though he remained married to his wife, Carla, and was devoted to their children (one of whom married the pianist Vladimir Horowitz). In the 1930s he fell spectacularly in love with Ada Mainardi, 30 years younger and wife of the cellist Enrico Mainardi. Over a period of seven years he wrote her nearly 1,000 hot, ecstatic letters, engaging in schoolboy subterfuge — disguised writing and easily unravelled anagrams — to keep the affair secret. A proportion of them form the cen tral part of this collection. Their explicit eroticism has caused a good deal of (dare one say juvenile?) excitement. Conductors behaving badly is hardly news. That euphemistic references to oral sex, orgasms and the uses to which menstrual blood might be put (that blood-stained handkerchief he kept in his pocket at Salzburg must have done wonders for his Beethoven) can still titillate is surprising.
Perhaps the truth is that these sexy messages prove the most interesting part of the correspondence, since so much else is dull and workaday. His needy devotion, heavy with underlining and repetition (I'm in a blind despair ... I'm suffering, suffering ... I kiss you. I kiss you. I kiss you desperately. Write to me ... I beg, I plead, I supplicate') must eventually have bored Ada as it does us.
The book is published jointly by Alfred A. Knopf, New York and Faber in the UK. What a pity Faber seems to have had no hand in the design. It falls far short of their recent exemplary volumes of Mozart and Walton letters. Here, everything in the fussy layout is hard work for the reader. Sachs's assiduous commentary follows after instead of preceding the letters, each of which is headed with a maddening crossword clue abbreviation (E. P. MI, 10 OCTOBER 1936; TO AM. HIR: FSD-FOF — to take a shorter one at random). It is incomprehensible unless you have the spare time to code-break by checking the list of abbrevia
tions. Frankly with 725 letters to get through, that's unlikely. The photographs (only five in a book of 468 pages) are standard portrait fare, the kind found on record covers with nothing of additional personal, or even adulterous interest. 'I am a pig,' noted Toscanini to Sir John Barbirolli in 1940. He might have been describing this inelegantly produced edition.
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